3 ms·

I was able to have the dots come on and off while I focused on the center. Turning them on and off at will when i wanted them to. What shocked me is that you

by maeon3 15y ago

I was able to have the dots come on and off while I focused on the center. Turning them on and off at will when i wanted them to. What shocked me is that you can make the yellow dots 5 times there size, and they will still disappear. I think this shows there are multiple modes of human vision. During the first few hundred milliseconds we are in "situation assessment mode" where we see the outer dots perfectly, during "focus on something" mode, the dots go away. This provides insight into the exact algorithm our visual cortex uses to parse whatever data streams come from the eyes. Amazing!

CognitiveLens 15y ago
That's probably a fair general characterization of what is going on, but the core part is that our perceptual systems respond primarily to change - if things in our field of vision are not changing, they produce less of a "signal" in our brains. It's not our perceptual system that is switching modes as much as it is the world changing between active and static. In the MIB case, most of the field of view is constantly changing, providing a lot of signal, but the yellow dots are low signal, and so our brains happily fill in the static dots with the in-motion background around it. Moving your eyes, blinking, or moving your head around all introduce enough visual change to re-set the full visual field, which is why the yellow dots reappear. Through top-down attentional control, you can have some influence over whether/which dots disappear - in effect, you are turning up the signal gain on particular receptors in the visual field around the target dots. You can also see why this affects people with monocular vision just as well - a lot of this perceptual processing happens at a very low level, well before binocular cues get integrated.